Tonight we have a very great debate! Two top Health search engines, GoPubMed (Dr. Michael R. Alvers, CEO and Co-Founder) and SearchMedica (Cyndy Finnie, senior product manager) have graciously agreed to share their thoughts on this very important area of Search.*

1) Of all the Verticals that we track, Health related search engines is easily the most crowded.

[See Healthline, GoPubMed, RevolutionHealth, Kosmix, CognitionSearch, GenieKnows (Health), MEDgle, Helia, ReleMed, MedWhat, MedicineNet,Diagnosaurus, WebMD,
MedlinePlus, HealthExcite, PubMed, just to name a few!]

Note:GoPubMed is not really a customer health search engine!
First GoPubMed is not an “end consumer oriented” search engine. GoPubMed is
made and tailored for biomedical researchers and allows scientists to find results much faster than e.g. with PubMed. The categorization in “Health related search engines” could be confusing for the Altsearchengines readers. In an open medicine blog you can read: “Consumers need medical information to be organized and accessible … and easier to access … especially in ways that make it as simple as possible to find the information most
relevant to a specific patient’s needs.” GoPubMed does not address this clientele.

To keep the scientific focus in opposition to the majority of search machines GoPubMed doesn’t include ads. We keep the site clear and well structured as stated by one of our users: “Also, I have a strong personal preference for a lot of white space, which is one reason I really like GoPubMed’s design.”

a) What accounts for so many entrants?

Because the topic is very interesting … health plays a big – may be the
biggest – role in the life of many people. But we think there is plenty of
space for many players. Also the field is wide as GoPubMed shows: we are made for the group of scientists and therefore more for basic research others are made for layman not capable of understanding scientific texts.

While it may be the case that health-related search engines are increasingly ubiquitous, SearchMedica is quite different. In a very short time you can already see the landscape starting to change as more and more physicians and health care professionals become familiar with SearchMedica.

For instance, you mentioned GoPubMed as an example of a similarly positioned medical search engine, when actually SearchMedica is not meant to be used in the same way as the many sites out there that make PubMed searchable; rather SearchMedica complements these other resources for more comprehensive searches. While a PubMed search provides an invaluable resource to the medical professional conducting in-depth academic research or planning a trip to the medical library, SearchMedica caters more to medical professionals in various specialties that need quick, clinical, practical answers to assist them in day-to-day patient care issues.

b) Which one(s) are you competing with?

In general we are complementary … our knowledge-based technology can be adapted to other fields. We could boost performance of practically all
search engines not only in this field. Using knowledge (networks) for search makes the difference that makes the difference.

A recent survey conducted by SearchMedica suggested that our biggest competitor isn’t even a direct competitor at all, at least not from our perspective. We surveyed 6,000 physicians and learned that Google and other consumer search engines were frequently used by physicians to get clinical information. Among physicians 45 and under, more than 90 percent said they used the Internet and search engines frequently, and Google was the preferred search engine among all specialties surveyed. When asked why, the answer was simple. Forty-three percent offered the top response, “it seemed like a good place to start.”

Google may be popular among physicians, but they also expressed a certain degree of dissatisfaction, with 65 percent of primary care physicians (PCPs) saying Google searches returned too many irrelevant results.

SearchMedica returns fewer results than Google and other consumer search engines much like Healia and other medical search engines built for consumers. Generally, that’s the beauty of vertical search. What we’ve done with SearchMedica is segment that medical information further ensuring that doctors only find credible, clinical information to assist in their day-to-day patient care needs when they conduct a SearchMedica search in any of our specialty engines.

c) How do you plan to stand out in such a crowd?

Our technology is leading edge and general … GoPubMed is today applied for life sciences and in the oil and gas industry and the methodology can be use for all fields where search is of importance. Some numbers: We can fully automatically match text to ontologies with 85% accuracy (for experts: f-measure) and we can do this job minimum 10 time faster than others can. The technology is based on now 7 years of research and can not be copied in a reasonable amount of time.

SearchMedica provides complete and open access to professional, credible and authoritative medical information. We don’t require registration or ask for a fee. And while our primary audience is physicians, we also provide a valuable service to clinicians and practitioners in need of reliable and authoritative medical information. In fact, no AMA number is required to use SearchMedica — which is not the case many other social networking sites for physicians only.

SearchMedica will stand out in the market by continuing to reach new medical professionals. When they use the SearchMedica engines for the first time, a common response is “great but what does it cost?” Our ad supported model makes it free for medical professionals without introducing any bias into the search results.

We have also seen some substantial interest in the SearchMedica search box, which we allow appropriate medical Web sites to post free of charge as a value add to their visitors, and we’ll be unveiling a SearchMedica toolbar in the future which will integrate with mainstream browsers and is always available to medical professionals working online.

2) If a physician said, respectfully, “I don’t want my patients self-diagnosing themselves or their family & friends on any Health site. They might make a terrible mistake; if they have symptoms, I want them to call me”. How would you respond?

First of all: GoPubMed is not related with self-diagnosing … In Germany a medical doctor is still the first place to go if one encounters health
problems. But for getting an overview, even I check the Internet when it comes to the medical issues related to my private pilot licence. GoPubMed is not good for “normal people” but it tremendously can help medical doctors itself to stay current on actual research in the context of certain diseases. We should keep in mind, that daily appear 2000 (!) new articles in the life sciences only. We are consulted be many docs and get fabulous feedback of keeping them on the leading edge!

Also we provide GoWeb (http://gopubmed.org/goweb/). The readers can test this machine online. We recommend searching using specific sites (with the “site:” key) like PubMed Central, BioMed Central, EMBL-EBI, Journal of Biology. There the quality of the bibliography citations is very good: scientifically correct so to say.

This isn’t really applicable to SearchMedica since we’re first and foremost designed for physicians and practitioners. Users have communicated to us that they appreciate easy entry into SearchMedica for their own purposes and recognize that the design and content of the tool would not be relevant to a non-professional audience.

3) Quality control. What steps do you take to ensure that your users get high quality, current, and accurate medical answers?

GoPubMed is based on PubMed … and therefore state of the art in science! A better quality approval is IMHO not thinkable. Our “Hot Topics” are revised and updated 4 times in year. In a way our users profit from the work of the
scientific editors from the journals who ensure quality of publications. For double checking we also provide Wiki links. According to the Nature article
(http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438890a.html) Wiki entries are
mostly correct. We also may say that our algorithm for the Protein name extraction won the prestigious BioCreative contest this year.

SearchMedica uses a combination of technology and human intelligence to ensure quality results. Our medical editors have more than 20 years of publishing experience - focusing on the information needs of clinicians. They and the doctors on our editorial boards recommend and approve Web sites for inclusion within SearchMedica. We haven’t found a piece of technology that can replicate that level of experience and expertise, and our community of medical professionals continues to praise the quality of the search results.

We also leverage technology to serve practitioners’ needs. In terms of how SearchMedica ranks its results, we asked the medical professionals in our focus groups to evaluate SearchMedica, and they primarily emphasized two factors as being incredibly important: relevance and timeliness. SearchMedica Oncology is the first true healthcare search engine to feature timeline ranking, which gives medical professionals the option to view results in order of publishing date. This puts newer articles in front of older ones. SearchMedica does this with both PubMed’s Medline, online medical journals, and other professional medical sites and resources. (Most search engines for medical professionals only do this with PubMed).

4) Would you agree that most people would “Google” (or ‘Yahoo!’) their
medical questions, even though Health search engines are more user-friendly and helpful? What could get users to change their habit of typing keywords into one of the major search engines?

Simplicity is my answer. Example: Search for Aspirin in GoPubMed and you get more than 40.000 results in PubMed. To narrow it down to 5 just navigate the left hand tree to e.g. Diseases – Cardiovascular Disease – Heard Diseases. 3
Clicks, 3 Seconds that’s helpful. Exercise: try to find these articles with PubMed, Google or Yahoo and explain why you have chosen this five. My bet: 1 Bottle of very good sparkling wine from Saxony if you stay below one hour.

Again, we looked at this phenomenon in relation to how physicians were using search engines. As more physicians, clinicians and practitioners learn about this next generation of medical search engines, try out the tools and share their experience with colleagues, we’re confident that changes in behavior will occur rapidly.

We’re also providing a valuable service and expanding SearchMedica’s footprint by offering the SearchMedica search boxes on Web sites frequently visited by our target audience.

5) We always finish with this question: do you see any value in partnerships with other “Alternative” (not one of the Top 5) search engines, either within the Health Vertical or with any others (perhaps powering a Health “tab” in a general search engine - like “images,” or “jobs.”?

We’d consider every offer for collaboration! We think we can contribute to
intelligently improve the search features of all sites. We provide our
technology platform as OEM and it is successfully used by many.

SearchMedica is always happy to partner with Web sites and organizations who share our values and mission in providing open access of professional medical content to physicians, practitioners and clinicians.

Many thanks to GoPubMed and SearchMedica for donating their time!

If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment for our guests.

*This debate was originally scheduled for last week, but we did not receive answers from TauMed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 7:41 pm and is filed under Debates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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